Silk Road shut down by FBI in October 2013. Silk Road 2.0 closed down by police on 6 November 2014.[5] Silk Road 3.0 is online.[6]

Silk Road was an online black market, best known as a platform for selling illegal drugs. As part of the Dark Web,[7] it was operated as a Tor hidden service, such that online users were able to browse it anonymously and securely without potential traffic monitoring. The website was launched in February 2011; development had begun six months prior.[8][9] Initially there were a limited number of new seller accounts available; new sellers had to purchase an account in an auction. Later, a fixed fee was charged for each new seller account.[10][11]

In February 2013, an Australian cocaine and MDMA ("ecstasy") dealer became the first person to be convicted of crimes directly related to Silk Road, after authorities intercepted drugs he was importing through the mail, searched his premises, and discovered his Silk Road alias in an image file on his personal computer.[21] Australian police and the DEA have targeted Silk Road users and made arrests, albeit with limited success at reaching convictions.[19][22][23] In December 2013, a New Zealand man was sentenced to two years and four months in jail after being convicted of importing 15 grams of methamphetamine he had bought on Silk Road.[24]

In May 2013, Silk Road was taken down for a short period of time by a sustained DDoS attack.[25] On 23 June 2013, it was first reported that the DEA seized 11.02 bitcoins, then worth $814, which the media suspected was a result of a Silk Road honeypot sting.[26][27][28]

Ulbricht was indicted on charges of money laundering, computer hacking, conspiracy to traffic narcotics,[32][33] and attempting to have six people killed.[34] Prosecutors alleged that Ulbricht paid $730,000 to others to commit the murders, although none of the murders actually occurred.[34] Ulbricht ultimately was not prosecuted for any of the alleged murders.[35]

The FBI initially seized 26,000 bitcoins, worth approximately $3.6 million at the time, from accounts on Silk Road. An FBI spokesperson said the agency would hold the bitcoins until Ulbricht's trial finished, after which the bitcoins would be liquidated.[36] Later, in October 2013, the FBI reported that it had seized 144,000 bitcoins, worth $28.5 million, and that the bitcoins belonged to Ulbricht.[37] On 27 June 2014, the U.S. Marshals Service sold 29,657 bitcoins in 10 blocks, estimated to be worth $18 million at current rates, and only about a quarter of the seized bitcoins, in an online auction. Another 144,342 bitcoins, roughly $87 million, found on Ulbricht's computer, were kept.[38]Tim Draper bought the bitcoins with an estimated worth of $17 million at the auction, to lend them to a bitcoin start-up called Vaurum, which is working in developing economies of emerging markets.[39]

Ulbricht's trial began on 13 January 2015 in Federal Court in Manhattan.[40] At the start of the trial, Ulbricht admitted to founding the Silk Road website, but claimed to have transferred control of the site to other people soon after he founded it.[41] Ulbricht's lawyers contended that Dread Pirate Roberts was really Mark Karpelès, and that Karpelès set up Ulbricht as a fall guy.[42] However, Judge Katherine B. Forrest ruled that any speculative statements regarding whether Karpelès or anyone else ran Silk Road would not be allowed, and statements already made would be stricken from the record.[43]

In the second week of the trial, prosecutors presented documents and chat logs from Ulbricht's computer that, they said, demonstrated how Ulbricht had administered the site for many months, which contradicted the defense's claim that Ulbricht had relinquished control of Silk Road. Ulbricht's attorney suggested that the documents and chat logs were planted there by way of BitTorrent, which was running on Ulbricht's computer at the time of his arrest.[43]

On 4 February 2015, the jury convicted Ulbricht of all seven charges,[15] including charges of engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, narcotics-trafficking, money-laundering and computer-hacking. He faced 30 years to life in prison.[2][3] The government also accused Ulbricht of paying for the murders of at least five people, but there is no evidence the murders were actually carried out, and the accusations never became formal charges against Ulbricht.[44][45]

During the trial, Judge Forrest received death threats. Hackers posted her personal information, including her address and Social Security number, on an underground site called The Hidden Wiki. Ulbricht's lawyer, Joshua Dratel, said he and his client "obviously, and as strongly as possible, condemn" the anonymous postings against the judge. "They do not in any way have anything to do with Ross Ulbricht or anyone associated with him or reflect his views or those of anyone associated with him", Dratel said.[46]

In a letter to Judge Forrest before his sentencing, Ulbricht stated that his actions through Silk Road were committed through libertarian idealism and that "Silk Road was supposed to be about giving people the freedom to make their own choices" and admitted that he made a "terrible mistake" that "ruined his life".[51][52] On May 29, 2015, Ulbricht was handed five sentences to be served concurrently, including two for life imprisonment, without the possibility of parole.[53] He was also ordered to forfeit $183 million. Ulbricht’s lawyer, Joshua Dratel, said he would appeal the sentencing and the original guilty verdict.[44]

A Dutch drug dealer, 23-year old Cornelis Jan "Maikel" Slomp,[54] was found guilty for large scale selling of drugs through the Silk Road website and was sentenced in Chicago to 10 years in prison on 29 May 2015.[55][56] Another dealer, Steven Sadler, was sentenced to five years prison.

Buyers were able to leave reviews of sellers' products on the site, and in an associated forum where crowdsourcing provided information about the best sellers and worst scammers.[64] Most products were delivered through the mail, with the site's seller's guide instructing sellers how to vaccuum-seal their products to escape detection.[65]

Based on data from 3 February 2012 to 24 July 2012, an estimated $15 million in transactions were made annually on Silk Road.[66][67] Twelve months later, Nicolas Christin, the study's author, said in an interview that a major increase in volume to "somewhere between $30 million and $45 million" would not surprise him.[68] Buyers and sellers conducted all transactions with bitcoins (BTC), a cryptocurrency that provides a certain degree of anonymity.[69] Silk Road held buyers' bitcoins in escrow until the order had been received and a hedging mechanism allowed sellers to opt for the value of bitcoins held in escrow to be fixed to their value in US$ at the time of the sale to mitigate against Bitcoin's volatility. Any changes in the price of bitcoins during transit were covered by Dread Pirate Roberts.[70]

The complaint published when Ulbricht was arrested included information the FBI gained from a system image of the Silk Road server collected on 23 July 2013.[citation needed] It noted that, "From February 6, 2011 to July 23, 2013 there were approximately 1,229,465 transactions completed on the site. The total revenue generated from these sales was 9,519,664 Bitcoins, and the total commissions collected by Silk Road from the sales amounted to 614,305 Bitcoins. These figures are equivalent to roughly $1.2 billion in revenue and $79.8 million in commissions, at current Bitcoin exchange rates...", according to the September 2013 complaint, and involved 146,946 buyers and 3,877 vendors.[12] According to information users provided upon registering, 30 percent were from the United States, 27 percent chose to be "undeclared", and beyond that, in descending order of prevalence: the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Canada, Sweden, France, Russia, Italy, and the Netherlands. During the 60-day period from 24 May to 23 July, there were 1,217,218 messages sent over Silk Road's private messaging system.[12]

The Farmer's Market was a Tor site similar to Silk Road, but which did not use bitcoins.[71] It has been considered a 'proto-Silk Road' but the use of payment services such as PayPal and Western Union allowed law enforcement to trace payments and it was subsequently shut down by the FBI in 2012.[64][72][73] Other sites already existed when Silk Road was shut down and The Guardian predicted that these would take over the market that Silk Road previously dominated.[74][75] Sites named 'Atlantis', closing in September 2013, and Project Black Flag, closing in October 2013, each stole their users' bitcoins.[13] In October 2013, the site named Black Market Reloaded closed down temporarily after the site's source code was leaked.[13] The market shares of various Silk Road successor sites were described by The Economist in May 2015.[76]

Alert placed on the Silk Road's homepage following its being seized by the U.S. government and European law enforcement.

On 6 November 2013, administrators from the closed Silk Road relaunched the site, led by a new pseudonymous Dread Pirate Roberts, and dubbed it "Silk Road 2.0". It recreated the original site's setup and promised improved security.[13] The new DPR took the precaution of distributing encrypted copies of the site's source code to allow the site to be quickly recreated in the event of another shutdown.[77]

On 20 December 2013, it was announced that three alleged Silk Road 2.0 administrators had been arrested;[78] two of these suspects, Andrew Michael Jones and Gary Davis, were named as the administrators "Inigo" and "Libertas" who had continued their work on Silk Road 2.0.[79] Around this time, the new Dread Pirate Roberts abruptly surrendered control of the site and froze its activity, including its escrow system. A new temporary administrator under the screenname "Defcon" took over and promised to bring the site back to working order.[80]

On 13 February 2014, Defcon announced that Silk Road 2.0's escrow accounts had been compromised through a vulnerability in Bitcoin's protocol called "transaction malleability".[81] While the site remained online, all the bitcoins in its escrow accounts, valued at $2.7 million, were reported stolen.[81] It was later reported that the vulnerability was in the site's "Refresh Deposits" function, and that the Silk Road administrators had used their commissions on sales since 15 February to refund users who lost money, with 50 percent of the hack victims being completely repaid as of 8 April.[82]

^Dread Pirate Roberts (26 June 2011). "New seller accounts". Silk Road forums. Retrieved 5 August 2013. [...] we shut down new seller accounts briefly, but have now opened them up again. This time, we are limiting the supply of new seller accounts and auctioning them off to the highest bidders. Our hope is that by doing this, only the most professional and committed sellers will have access to seller accounts. For the time being, we will be releasing one new seller account every 48 hours, though this is subject to change. If you want to become a seller on Silk Road, click "become a seller" at the bottom of the homepage, read the seller contract and the Seller's Guide, click "I agree" at the bottom, and then you'll be taken to the bidding page. Here, you should enter the maximum bid you are willing to make for your account upgrade. The system will automatically outbid the next highest bidder up to this amount. [...]

^Dread Pirate Roberts (1 July 2011). "New seller accounts". Silk Road forums. Retrieved 5 August 2013. [...] We received a threat from a very disturbed individual who said they would pose as a legitimate vendor, but send carcinogenic and poisonous substances instead of real products and because seller registration is open, they would just create a new account as soon as they got bad feedback. This was shocking and horrifying to us and we immediately closed new seller registration. Of course we need new sellers, though, so we figured that charging for new seller accounts would deter this kind of behavior. [...]

^Joseph Cox (22 April 2014). "How Silk Road Bounced Back from Its Multimillion-Dollar Hack". Vice magazine. Defcon told me that staff concluded there was a vulnerability in the “Refresh Deposits” function of the site. Using this, the hacker was able to spam the link and exponentially credit their account with more and more bitcoins, taking them out of the section of Silk Road that stored the currency while it was being traded... According to Silk Road staff members, 50 percent of the hack victims had been completely repaid as of April 8, and users themselves have been continually reporting payments since the breach, posting on the site forum when they receive their payment. Since February 15, the administration of the site has not made any commissions on sales. Instead, every time a purchase is made, a five percent slice of the cost goes directly into the account of a randomly determined hack victim.